All posts for the day November 10th, 2007

My comments don’t seem to get approved any more on Publius Pundit ever since I dared to disagree with Kim Zigfield too many times. But part of the continuing meme that’s being pushed in various quarters, including CNN and Publius is that Bhutto is some kind of pro-democracy activist.

She is not. The only reason Benazir Bhutto ever came to power was because her Daddy happened to be running the country with an iron fist. Even in an era with elections, a dispassionate view of Pakistan immediately flies in the face of anything we call democracy. Bhutto can bring tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people into the streets for her, it’s true…

That’s because they are her serfs. Pakistan is still largely a feudal country, and those people will show up, because they’re utterly dependent upon the large landowners, and it’s their ass if they don’t. Same thing with Nawaz Sharif: the great “election” between these two neo-feudal clowns is simply two large factions of formerly-princely land-owning clans fighting over who gets to run the government by and for their own faction’s benefit.

Democracy in Pakistan was a sick and tragic joke long before Musharraf came onto the primary political scene. Don’t be fooled by the out-and-out b.s. being put out by a mainstream media that seems to think that nobody has a memory lasting longer than, say, three years.

(This is especially egregious of CNN, which used to actually report on this sort of business before “I don’t know basic undergrad shit, but I can dress it up in a dangerous-sounding interview” Amanpour got her reign of continuous bullshit in charge. But, hey, she’s married to an ambassador, so that means she knows her ass from a hole in the ground, right? No.)